Melancholy
by NRATQH
Summary: Donatello is sure that he and his brothers are too young to have to experience the death of one of their own. But that doesn't stop it from happening and they are unprepared as to how to deal with the consequences... He wonders if this is what it feels like to get sucked into a black hole. Character death.
Life is at the end of the day merely a repetitive routine. Activities that are done again and again like stones stacking to form a hill. It is relentless and meaningless and the only thing you can look forward to are the little knots that tie themselves up in your time line. Events written by every choice and decision you make. Though some events prefered over others and some with the potential to destroy as much as others can build.

But than there are those events down the line that are set in stone like a warning on the wall you wish you could ignore but it screams at you every chance it gets and you're a fool for not taking heed sooner. Even if 'taking heed' simply meant realizing there are some things in your life that will occur whether you want to or not and if you're smart you'll be ready for them.

Unfortunately no matter how 'ready' we are when these event's occur we will never be prepared _enough._

No one know's this better than the turtles. Doesn't meant it doesn't catch them off guard though.

...

 _Silence_ never felt so heavy, so thick than the night they lost one of their own.

What are you suppose to feel? When of the 4 parts of the whole that made you, warped you, created you and forged who you were had a missing piece. Donny has read numerous accounts of people who have lost loved ones. Most keep saying how it felt like a hole had been made or torn where their heart should be.

Donny begs to differ. Because it's not just his heart, it's his head, his arms, his legs, paralysed by the weigh of the truth that was now the expected normality. The unchangeable fact that four had finally become three.

He can't help but wonder as they make their way back to the lair from the short funeral at the farmhouse, if there's something wrong with him. Surely he's suppose to feel something more? A sense of loss? Unbearable grief? A crazed madness or anger and inabillity to accept what has happened.

But there's nothing. There is literally nothing. His mind, for what seems like the first time since he was brought in to this world was completely and utterly blank. Empty. No train of thought, no opinion or idea or comprehension. Just an absolute, heavy abyss of nothing that spreads through his body like a passive poison, numbing his senses to the very last nerve. Like fire on an oil trail, unstoppable as it spreads burning every drop.

Donny wonders absentmindedly if this is what it feels like to get sucked into a black hole. The absolute emptiness that awaits you so suffocating in its weight that you have to tell yourself to keep breathing cause you think you'll forget how if you don't.

The door of their home slowly creaks open and Don, finally unable to bear it anymore, does the one thing no one expects him to do. As soon as they enter the lair he practically runs to his lab not even caring for the people behind him or even thinking of closing the door. He doesn't care about the reactions he will receive for what he is about to do. He just knows he needs to feel _**something**_.

He needs to hear the sound of all the computers in his room noisily turn on and whir and the machines around him to clatter and klunk as they move but it isn't enough and he doesn't think when he picks up the centrifuge he'd built from scratch as a child and throws it into the wall. He doesnt count how many computers he pushes violently to the floor like crumbs of a dinner table. His eyes are wide and crazed as he pulls out his bows and brings it down with an almighty crash upon the machines that lay arranged around him. He relishes the scent that wavers and excites his nerves that come from the burning pile of documents he'd just set alight. Documents he'd kept and written from paper he'd salvaged like gold from a stream from his childhood. Papers filled with studies that he had hoped would one day change the world. Papers filled with notes of his brothers and father. Loving notes, tired notes, curious and bewildered in his quest to understand his family and their predicament. To salvage whatever legacy they hoped to leave behind. Notes about their health and mind. About how his father had kept them healthy as well as he could with what they had. Leo would have been angry. He'd written half of his entries with him especially on nights when both of them were abandoned by sleep.

He watches it all burn and falls to his knees. Tears finally streaming down his face for what feels like the first time since his brothers heart had stopped beating on the makeshift table that was now scattered in pieces across the laboratory floor. He almost feels joy at being able to finally show his grief to the world. To finally be able to feel something. He breathes it in, pulls it through his skin like toxins burning his insides and he relishes every second of it.

He takes it all in and when he can't take anymore he opens his mouth and he _howls_. A terrible, deep inhuman wail of grief and pain that echoes against the walls of his labs like a million voices responding to his torment with their own.

The shrieks drum against his ears and tears blind his sight eliminating any other senses to distract him from his misery.

But suddenly he feels a pairs of arms encompassing his frame. They're small and gentle and they barely reach full circle but they hold him tight against the hard surface of a ridged plastron as if it was all they could do to keep him anchored to their world.

He wants to fight, he wants to get away, he wants to scream and yell and shut it all out but they are followed by another stronger pair and his exhaustion seeps in and it's all he could do to not just collapse himself in their hold. He ceases his struggle and leans in to their embrace to tired to make a sound except to call out for his lost brother in silent anguished cries begging him to come back even as he knows they will never be answered.

Because his brother. His leader. Leonardo hamato. Was dead.


End file.
